Maths & Literacy in Room 19.

Quite often I put up a blog post for an exciting event, or some amazing art work, but not so much about what happens on a daily basis in Room 19.

So here is just a snippet from our day on Thursday of this week ....

Maths - we went back to basics with fractions, talking about what fractions are ( pieces of a whole), whether it matters what size the pieces are (yes - there is no such thing as a bigger half!) and how we write fractions as a symbol and as words.  We started with halves and the students were given different shapes to cut out and fold to find 2 equal parts - 2 halves.  They labelled them, stuck them in their books and completed a worksheet that asked them to circle the shapes that were divided into halves and colour one half of the shape in.  Some of these sheets are up in the classroom.  To reach Stage 5 in maths for Fractions students need to be able to identify the symbols (½), names (half) and regions (e.g. the shaded part of a shape) for one half, one third, one quarter, one fifth and one tenth. We will continue to work on these fractions across the rest of this term and next.

Literacy- we are continuing with reading in our groups, and in writing time our focus this term has been on Explanation writing, although we have also continued to write Recounts of our weekend and special events like our visit to Tree Adventures and our EOTC week sleepover.  Here are a few student examples of both explanation and recount writing ......

We have also done some creative writing which will lead us in to our focus on Narrative writing over the next few weeks.  We have been working on including adjectives and similes and alliteration in our writing to make it really interesting for the reader.

As part of our Literacy time we have a warm up, sometimes this is thinking of words containing different letter blends, or word families, sometimes it is words that rhyme.  

We try and find new ways to think about these warm ups which is why on Thursday we had a game of Fly Swat Rhyming Words.  I wrote a number of words on the whiteboard (jump, cot, kiss, red etc.) and then the class was split into two teams.  A member of each team went head to head with a fly swat and the first person to 'swat' the correct rhyming word to the word I called out got a point for their team. 

  We definitely like to have fun when we are learning!